YOU DON'T NEED TO GO TO THE CROSSROADS TO MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL. THE CROSSROADS WILL COME TO YOU.

James 'Blue' Moon, the greatest living bluesman, was ten years old when he saw Robert Johnson playing on a street corner. Now, more than seventy years later, he's dying of cancer. His last wish is to reunite his estranged family - his soul-diva daughter Venetia Moon and his grandson, hip-hop mogul Calvin 'Ice Blue' Holland - for one final album. Enter his former protégé, hapless British blues-rock superstar Mick Hudson, who has unfinished business with all three of them, plus a posse of vengeful gangstaz and a mysterious figure with whom Blue struck a deal one dark, bloody night at a haunted crossroads back in his native Mississippi Delta. It's a potent mix of secrets, nightmares and lies, spanning decades and continents. James 'Blue' Moon has one last chance to escape the hellhound on his trail ... if the cancer doesn't get him first.

YOU NEVER GET OUT OF THESE BLUES ALIVE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award winner CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY has been appearing regularly in print for four decades, and has long been recognised as one of the most admired stylists in British pop-cultural journalism. He is "the rock critic's rock critic" (Q magazine), a "front-line cultural warrior" and "original gunslinger" (Independent on Sunday). The first two decades of his journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse have been collected in Shots From The Hip. He is the internationally acclaimed author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century. More»

This is his first novel.

It's a killer.

CRITICAL REACTION

“Rock novels often shy away from the music, but this one comes alive every time someone strums a chord or opens their mouth to sing... Fans of the music will enjoy Murray's spirited homage.”Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent»"Charles Shaar Murray has given us a phenomenal story, with a handful of characters so completely drawn, you think they're jamming in the next room. From a barber shop in the Delta in the 1930s to the bustle and movement that was rock's birth in early 1960s UK to the sun-baked canyons of LA in the present day, Murray takes us on a journey of family, passion, culpability, and talent. It's all here: The ties that bind, the price you pay for the choices you make, and oh, man, the music! There's not a note, a harmonic, a single chord progression, that doesn't ring out like the voice of Robert Johnson's devil-haunted guitar.THE HELLHOUND SAMPLE is staggering. It achieves something rare in fiction: it makes you feel and it makes you wonder."